‘Gutshot,’ Stories by Amelia Gray

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By Ramona Ausubel

May 22, 2015

When Amelia Gray was asked in an interview if she would always be a writer, she said: “If writing makes me feel like this for the rest of my life, I’ll do it for the rest of my life, yes, of course. But maybe writing won’t always make me feel like this and something else will replace it, and then I’ll end up spending the rest of my life making candy or burning down churches.” Gray, who is the author of two previous collections, “AM/PM” and “Museum of the Weird,” and a novel, “Threats,” does not need to change careers to achieve either goal — her new story collection, “Gutshot,” is a bizarre and darkly funny world made of molten sugar and the ashes of everything she has set alight.

“Gutshot” exhibits a wide range of style and theme. There are fables (a town is divided in half by a giant snake), horror stories (a woman is about to be killed in a stranger’s house), absurd stories (two women get into an escalated battle of thank-you gifts, including a tube of mice that poop out a message) and more serious stories about love. It’s sometimes difficult to gain purchase because the ground keeps shifting, yet this also has the seemingly intended effect of making the reader submissive. Reading “Gutshot” is a little like being blindfolded and pelted from all sides with fire, Jell-O and the occasional live animal. You’ll be messy at the end and slightly beaten up, but surprised and certainly entertained.

Many of Gray’s characters allow themselves to act on their weirdest and darkest desires. Some are crazy people searching for real connection; the collection ­closes, for instance, with the tale of a young woman who drags her aging and decrepit mother to a burned-out rural shack she has taken as her lover (yes, the building itself is the lover). “And there, knees muddling the char, my girl kissed the brick. . . . Hunched there on the ground, she licked and gagged, whimpering as sweetly as when she nursed from my breast.”

Elsewhere the characters are “normal” people whose real emotional aches push them to do crazy things. In “House Heart,” a couple hire a prostitute — but instead of paying her for sex, they lock her (naked) in the system of heating ducts in their house and leave her there indefinitely. This is vintage Amelia Gray, a phantasmagoria of sex and love and perversion circling the idea of predator and prey, the idea of impulse and will and control. As with so many of her stories, she pushes against the outer limits of what humans can and will do. She seems to be testing her readers, too. Will you come with me here? How about if I take it a little further? Are you still game?

Some stories will test readers and lose them. “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover” is just what it sounds like, a (successful) gross-out attempt. Another story includes a scene in which a woman cuts off a man’s penis during sex, then sews herself closed around it.

When the woman in “House Heart” begins to question the wisdom of locking a hooker in the vascular system of her home, her partner says, “Every life has its surrounding wall.” In these pages we can hear Gray knocking on her surrounding wall. She’s got the pickax at her feet and the hammer. Behind her is a wrecking ball. What she finds on the other side is anybody’s guess. Whatever it is, Amelia Gray won’t flinch. She’ll write.

Ramona Ausubel is the author of “No One Is Here Except All of Us” and “A Guide to Being Born.”